About
History
Southern Bancorp Community Partners (SBCP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and certified community development financial institution (CDFI) with a mission to transform rural Southern communities by creating new educational and economic opportunities for people with limited resources. SBCP works in partnership with Southern Bancorp (collectively “Southern”), one of the country’s largest rural development banks, to revitalize struggling rural areas. Southern’s geographic focus is the Mississippi River Delta region and southern Arkansas, a region plagued by long-term poverty, economic decline, loss of population, and many other severe challenges.
Southern Bancorp Community Partners was formed in 2012 as a merger between partner organizations, Southern Good Faith Fund and Southern Bancorp Capital Partners. For more than twenty years, these separate organizations worked collaboratively to provide critical community development, asset building, lending, and public policy services in the rural South while maintaining separate structures, missions, and goals. Over recent years, these entities have united under a common vision of reducing poverty, decreasing unemployment, and increasing educational attainment in Southern’s focus communities over the next generation.
Realignment of the programmatic and administrative aspects of these already closely aligned nonprofits will have multiple benefits not only for building communities and changing lives, but also for nonprofit cohesiveness and functionality. The new organization, SBCP, helps revitalize rural Southern communities using several strategies:
- A comprehensive community-driven strategic planning and implementation process that helps residents create and then build local capacity to implement a shared vision for economic recovery.
- Asset building opportunities that assist in helping low-income individuals and families build educational, financial, and material wealth so they can create better futures for themselves and their families.
- Employment services that help unemployed people find and keep jobs in their local area that pay a life-sustaining wage for the employees and their families.
- Proactive public policy change that magnifies local efforts and provides benefit for residents across a state or region.
- Nontraditional financing to individuals businesses with potential to create jobs and invest in their communities. As referenced above, SBCP is certified by the United States Department of the Treasury as a Community Development Financial Institution.
By building on the financial, social, and human capital that Southern provides, focus communities can become engines that drive revitalization in surrounding communities and across regions. SBCP has community service offices in Arkadelphia and Helena-West Helena, Arkansas and Clarksdale, Mississippi in addition to an administrative office in Little Rock, Arkansas.